Humans understand a large number of verbal and non-verbal cues that convey information during human communication. In particular, a number of cues can convey the emotional content of a statement to a human listener, such as the pitch, amplitude, and rate of speech. Cues can also convey social information among humans, including indicating the speaker's dominant or non-dominant status in a conversation. In many circumstances, humans tend to mimic the cues being communicated by others. For example, a human engaging in a conversation with another human may generate cues mimicking the emotional state conveyed by the other human in the conversation. As another example, a human may generate cues to reinforce the dominance status conveyed by the other person (e.g., generating cues of non-dominance in conversations in which the other human has conveyed dominance). Communicating those emotional and social cues may allow humans to increase clarity of communication and reduce potential conflict.
Increasing numbers of computer systems support spoken natural language interaction. For example, virtual personal assistants are popular artificial intelligence systems that perform tasks on a computing device in response to natural-language requests from a user. Such tasks typically include managing calendar items, contacts, and informational searches. Other typical natural language applications include automated telephone answering and help line systems as well as dictation systems. Typical systems supporting natural language interaction do not respond to emotional or social cues present in the user request.